But although Squire Trevor had saved Lady Bell by a word from an unscrupulous vagabond, Lady Bell had not taken to Squire Trevor from the first. She had been disagreeably struck by his touchy vanity, his rude dictation. She was indignant, disgusted, furiously angry when she learnt the proposal which he had made of himself within the first week of their acquaintance. But who was to help Lady Bell to assort her sentiments? Instead of helping, every one was against her, and she was only a girl of fifteen, all the more likely to be overborne and to give in at last, because of two things, the unreasonable violence of her opposition, and her old-fashioned, factitious dignity and self-consciousness. Lady Bell’s first tactics were sufficiently transparent; she made herself as disagreeable as possible to Squire Trevor. She never spoke to him voluntarily, and she only answered him in monosyllables. She retreated before his approach in the wilderness garden, or under the portico, showing him the last sweep of the tail of her train. She turned her shoulder to him, polite as she was, when she was forced to encounter him in Mrs. Die’s parlour, and when, to Lady Bell’s anger and dismay, the seat next her was significantly appropriated to Squire Trevor. She would not accept the early rose which he took from the bow-pot and offered to her. She would not eat the bread and butter which he had, according to the homely gallantry of the generation, prepared specially for her consumption. She refused to sing to him. She ventured to cry aloud coldly, “Oh! Mr. Trevor, don’t make such a pother,” when he insisted on her being promoted to the card-table on the single occasion that Squire Godwin condescended to sit down for a family game, with Mrs. Die launching at her brother her madly malicious innuendoes. CHAPTER VIII. MARRIED IN A DAY. All was utterly in vain, as futile as Lady Bell’s dressing herself in her dowdiest clothes with her shabbiest, least “setting” top-knots. If Lady Bell had only known in her youthful inexperience, there was something irresistibly piquant and provocative in her pouts and flouts, her sulks and _déshabillés_, to most men who had her in their power. The mere circumstance that her resistance, sincere to anguish as it was, in its openness, was weak as her age, would have been enough to all, save a generous man, in the conduct of such an attack, while to a man like Squire Trevor, any opposition, however feeble, served but as tinder to flame. Lady Bell’s next move was made in the utmost alarm on the arrival of a pair of valuable buckles set with diamonds, and a necklace with an emerald “bob,” for which Squire Trevor had sent a messenger expressly, and which were put by his direction, and with the connivance of others, in their cases with the lids open, on the little table before the mirror in Lady Bell’s closet.